This is a dev release for the hopefully soon 0.80 release. There's been a _lot_ of changes, so if people could test this and report back I'd be very grateful. There's also some features I might try to add before 0.80, notably table update & delete, but those don't seem that urgent.
I'd also appreciate suggestions on how to improve the docs. I get the impression that lots of people find the docs a bit overwhelming and/or unclear, so pointers to specific spots that need work or suggestions on new pieces to add would be great. Special thanks go to Ilya Martynov and Ken Williams, both of whom contributed quite a bit to this release. Ilya contributed a monster refactoring patch for the row class, and Ken contributed many smaller patches to improve various aspects of Alzabo, notable MethodMaker and Postgres support. 0.79_01 ENHANCEMENTS: - Distribution is now signed with Module::Signature. - Lots of refactoring of the row object internals to simplify the code. Implemented by Ilya Martynov. - The testing code has been cleaned up quite a bit, and all of the utility functions used in the tests have been consolidated in t/lib/Alzabo/Test/Utils.pm. - Added intermediate table and row classes for MethodMaker created classes, to provide a central point for adding new methods to table and row objects. Based on a patch from Ken Williams. - Support for "self-linking" tables in Alzabo::MethodMaker, a linking table which connects a table to itself in an n..n relationship. Implemented by Ken Williams. - Added rdbms_version method to driver classes. Implemented by Ken Williams. - Added Alzabo::Create::Schema->is_saved() method. - Foreign keys are now reverse engineered for Postgres 7.3+. Implemented by Ken Williams. - Don't try to include dropped columns when reverse engineering Postgres 7.3+. Implemented by Ken Williams. - Do a better job of detecting SERIAL type columns when reverse engineering Postgres schemas. Based on a patch from Ken Williams. - Treat Postgres data types SERIAL4, SERIAL8, BIGSERIAL, and BIGINT as valid types. Implemented by Josh Jore. - NotNullable exception now include the table and schema name. Based on a patch from Ken Williams. - Primary keys are updateable. - Debugging output from Alzabo::MethodMaker is clearer about what methods are being made. Implemented by Ken Williams. - Alzabo::MethodMaker will now create foreign key methods when two tables have multiple relationships, as long as the name generation callback returns different names for each of them. Implemented by Ken Williams. - A join parameter can now specify an outer join with a single array reference, such as: [ left_outer_join => $table_A, $table_B ] Previously, this could only be done as a double array reference, like: [ [ left_outer_join => $table_A, $table_B ] ] - Various doc fixes and rewriting, most notably in Alzabo.pm. BUG FIXES: - A join using multiple aliased tables would fail with an error message like "Cannot use column (Foo.bar_id) in select unless its table is included in the FROM clause". - Remove the long-ago deprecated next_row() and next_rows() methods. - Postgres 7.3 allows identifiers to be up to 63 characters. This broke the code that handled sequenced columns for Postgres. Patch by Josh Jore. - If you tried to create a relationship between two tables, and the "table_to" table already had a column of the same name as the "column_from" column, then Alzabo died with an error. Reported by Ping Liang. - If you had previously installed Alzabo, and then provided a new Alzabo root directory or a new directory for the Mason components, this was not respected during the installation process. - Alzabo's referential integrity checks will no longer complain if you attempt to set a foreign key column to NULL. Previously it would throw an exception if the column was part of the dependent table in a foreign key relationship. Now, it just assumes you really meant to allow the column to be NULLable. - The schema class's load_from_file() method now blesses the loaded schema into the calling class. So if you use MethodMaker to generate classes, and then call My::Schema->load_from_file, it should always return an object blessed into the My::Schema class. Reported by Ken Williams. - When checking for the MySQL variable sql_mode, the value may be simply '' as opposed to 0. Patch by Andrew Baumhauer. BACKWARDS INCOMPATIBILITIES: - Alzabo now requires at least Perl 5.6.0 (5.6.1+ recommended). - The old caching system has been removed, as it had way too much overhead. There is a new, much simpler caching system provided by the Alzabo::UniqueRowCache module. - The Alzabo::Runtime::Table->row_by_pk() method no longer dies if it cannot find a matching row. Instead it simply returns false. - Some deprecated MethodMaker options were removed: insert, update, lookup_table - The Alzabo::Runtime::Row->delete() method now works for potential rows. -dave /*======================= House Absolute Consulting www.houseabsolute.com =======================*/
